Low Life by Ryan David Jahn Page A

behind him. He put the keys back into his pocket and twisted the deadbolt home.
    The house appeared to be empty of life, but it also seemed to be humming; the electricity in here tingled on his skin and in his hair. The living room had polished hardwood floors. The walls
were a warm orange, the ceiling a darker version of the same. A flat-panel television hung on the living-room wall above the fireplace hearth, black plastic surrounding a black screen, a small red
light glowing in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. The fireplace itself was simply ornamental now, the one-inch stub of gas pipe sticking from the wall capped off long ago. Several candles
sat on the bricks in front of it. A plush brown couch sat atop an area rug that was thick and tightly woven. Expensive-looking art hung on the walls. The living room was the size of Simon’s
entire apartment.
    Shackleford: this was where he’d lived.
    Why had he wanted Simon dead?
    The orange walls wouldn’t tell him, nor the television, nor the floor beneath his feet.
    As Simon wandered through the house, he found a picture of Shackleford and a brunette woman, a woman he assumed was Shackleford’s wife. She was about six inches shorter than him, which
would make her five three, hair shoulder-length, eyes the color of a clear blue sky. Her skin was smooth and white, her lips pink and soft-looking, her neck graceful and thin and long. She was
wearing a gray blouse with the top two buttons undone, revealing the shallow cleavage of a small-breasted woman in a push-up bra. She wasn’t smiling save in one corner of her mouth, but her
eyes were alive with humor. She and Shackleford were arm in arm.
    The picture was in a four-by-six-inch frame, and Simon slipped it into the outside pocket of his brown corduroy coat.
    The dining room had been converted into an office. There was a desk against one wall with a computer atop it. The computer’s screen was black. There were stacks of paperwork on either side
of the keyboard. On the wall opposite the desk, three waist-high bookshelves filled with books on mathematics. The books seemed to be organized by difficulty rather than alphabetically. Several of
them were textbooks.
    Simon walked to the desk and sat down in a black leather chair. He grabbed a stack of paperwork from the desk and set it in his lap and flipped through it. He found gas bills, cable bills,
directions to various locations, torn bits of paper with phone numbers scrawled across them, penciled names of authors, and doodles of penises and breasts and eyes, sometimes in odd combination.
And at the bottom of the stack he found a folder filled with math tests for an Algebra I class, a class that had apparently been taught at Pasadena College of the Arts, a class that had apparently
been taught by Dr Jeremy Shackleford. They were from a summer session, now surely over.
    A mathematics instructor. Pasadena College of the Arts.
    Simon was setting the stack of paperwork back onto the desk when he heard a key sliding into the front door. He turned to face the sound and heard the lock tumble.
    He jumped to his feet and frantically looked for a place to hide.
    The doorknob rattled.
    There was a coat closet on the other side of the room. He ran for it.
    ‘Jeremy?’ the woman said.
    Simon recognized her from the photograph. Her voice was smoky but still feminine and very melodic; she almost sounded as if she were singing when she spoke. She stood near the couch, purse still
over her shoulder, keys still in hand. Simon could smell her from where he stood: a light, clean sweat and bar soap and lotion and some kind of fruit-scented shampoo.
    He could feel hangers poking into his back and the arms of leather and wool coats brushing against his wrists and hands. It gave him the creepy sensation that people were standing behind him. He
could smell the closed-off smell all closets seemed to possess, despite the slats in the door. He watched the woman on the other side